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Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage O-Zone Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad June 17, 2006 Council of Nicea: Setting the record straight Debate addresses the road to salvation By Fr. Isaac Skidmore For the Tidings The Tidings on June 2 ran a review of Siobhan Houston’s “Invoking Mary Magdalene,” one of a spate of books attaining attention in the wake of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.” Central to most is the contention that the fourth-century Church, under the auspices of the converted Emperor Constantine, engaged in a cover-up of Jesus Christ’s true identity, endorsed an official version of Christian faith and suppressed all competing ones. They claim that the Nicene council, in 325, voted to call Jesus God, in opposition to Arius, who asserted that he was a human being. Arius comes out as the hero in this version: the sole voice to defend Christ’s humanity. Nicea is depicted as an authoritarian squelching of the individual’s access to God, and of the possibility of personal, mystical experience. The trouble is, the depiction is false. It is incorrect to typify Nicea as a controversy over whether Christ was man or God — and a misunderstanding of their own tradition when modern-day Christians counter the claims of those who say Christ was human with the claim, “No, he’s God.” Neither the framers of Nicea (as is clear from the Nicene creed, and from the conciliar definitions that follow in its wake), nor Arius doubted Christ’s humanity. The debate was not primarily about the nature of Christ, but about the nature of the “one God,” whose son Christ is said to be. Arius believed it impossible for the creator of heaven and earth to be present to humanity in the way that Christ had obviously been. For him, it was absurd to suggest that the human attributes ascribed to Christ in Scripture — hunger, thirst, tiredness, mortality — could be attributed to God. Christ could not be a direct revelation of God, since this would implicate God in things incompatible with His absolute transcendence. Christ, for him, was a “lesser god,” a middle-man between God and creation, created by God as the first of His works, able to traverse the span between created and uncreated. In this way, Arius believed, he could recognize the ways in which Scripture speaks of Christ as divine, yet guard against direct association between God and creation. Christ was an agent, even the agent, of God in the world, but not His real presence. The Alexandrian Patriarch Athanasius, and those who followed his lead at the council, disagreed. Of paramount importance to them was that, regardless of the difficulties in conceiving how it can be, the language of Scripture affirming Christ as “God with us,” and the eternal “Word of God” made flesh, be taken to mean what it shockingly seems to mean: that God has appeared among men and taken mortality upon himself. The wording of the Nicene creed, that Christ is “Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” is intended to express this inexpressible closeness, to affirm that which we (as typified by Arius) appear so ready to doubt. In this case, dogma, far from stifling mystery, preserves it. It insists on the reality of both facets of the Gospel’s proclamation, God’s transcendence and His immanence, and counters our reductionistic tendency to ignore one side in our consideration of the other. The framers of Nicea saw themselves as expressing, in human language, the paradoxical avenue through which salvation is possible, without attempting to define the mechanics of how it can be so. Later Christian councils followed in this tradition, alternately saying what must be true about Christ with regard to his divinity, and what must be true about him with regard to his humanity, to do justice to the message of God’s scandalous nearness that they had received and confirmed in their own experience. Far from suppressing mysticism, it defined and defended the grounds upon which mysticism (as a real encounter between God and man) is possible. If Arius were correct, we would have to conclude the impossibility of real encounter between human beings and God. Evidence or experience to the contrary could only be fictitious or delusional. Those who try to defend the possibility of mystical experience by attacking Nicea may be abandoning their most powerful historical ally. If Arius is right, and Christ is not revelatory of God Himself, what theological inference can be drawn from his life? If Brown is right in claiming Nicea is a cover-up for Christ’s real identity (and that he is not truly representative of God), why find any significance in Mary Magdalene’s relationship to Christ, even if, by stretch of fantasy, she is His wife? And why, as Houston’s title suggests, “invoke” her, even if, as Houston says, she is His feminine spiritual counterpart? Interestingly, according to the review, Houston relies on the Nicene understanding of the divinity of Jesus in trying to describe what she believes to be special about Mary Magdalene. “As Jesus was God incarnated in human form, so was Mary Magdalene . . . ,” he begins, saying that this is the book’s guiding vision. Another misconception is that Nicea consigned gnostics to nethermost gloom. The decisive moments in the gnostic controversy had played out a century before, for the purposes of those at Nicea — including Arius, who was himself anti-gnostic. Gnosticism had presented its own challenges to the possibility of humans to encounter God, by saying that the creator of humanity and all material things was not the ultimate God, but an impostor whose works must be renounced. Humans could not know this God except by ceasing to be human. This was not salvation for humanity, but salvation from humanity. This past altercation with gnosticism is reflected in the Nicene creed’s identification of Jesus Christ’s Father as the “one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,” but was not the focus of the council. The incompatibility of gnosticism and the Nicene faith, grounded on mutually exclusive premises, has escaped Houston’s notice, who aims to merge them, as well as “to have long-patriarchal Christianity shake hands with budding, heavily feminine neo-paganism.” It’s remarkable that a council seventeen centuries old is still grist for controversy. Modern Christians often dismiss these ancient debates as irrelevant to faith, but discussions about how to describe Christ’s humanity and divinity are once again the topic of shopkeepers and barbers, not just theologians. We forfeit the responsibility of defining our words at the risk of having them defined by those who may not care what they mean. Isaac Skidmore is the priest at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Ashland. He can be reached at [email protected]. . Current Comments: Thanks to Pastor Skidmore and to the Tidings for publishing his helpful letter. Interested persons can find St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation of the Word on the Web for free, or as an inexpensive paperback in a contemporary translation, with a delightful introduction by C. S. Lewis. Dale Nelson - Mayville, North Dakota - July 8th, 8:18 AM Leave a Comment: --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.